I’ve also got rid of my first plugin.

Plugins that have been given a fresh lick of paint are (in no particular order)…

• Artiss PSN Status
• Artiss AdSense Insert
• Artiss Content Reveal
• Artiss Draft List
• Artiss Code Embed
• Artiss Twitter Data
• Artiss Relative Date
• Artiss YouTube Embed

You’ll notice they all begin with “Artiss” – another change which is part of a new re-branding exercise. Some of these, however, were modified early on and will be due a further update to bring them totally in line with current standards.

Existing plugins due for an upgrade in 2012 are…

• Flu Pandemic Level
• Google Docs Viewer
• Simple Social Bookmarks
• Simple Timed Content
• Simple URL Shortener
• WP README Parser

Simple Feed List is to be re-written from scratch with feed duties being all “in house” rather than relying on WP’s built in RSS functionality (which appears to be rather flaky).

Artiss Facebook Link, Simple Twitter Link and Simple Buzz Link will all be merged into one new plugin, Artiss Social Link.

Android App Share, Simple Readbag List, Simple TTIW List and Simple Wakoopa List will all be merged into a single new plugin, the name of which is yet to be decided. It will also allow for other sites that provide XML data.

WP Plugin Cache will be abandoned (as all caching will be performed by individual plugins).

What all of this will mean is a reduction in the number of plugins, by merging a number of similar products. However, all are due to recieve the “full monty” of additions so, rather than adding the odd small feature, most should require minimal maintenance in future. Plugins such as Social Bookmarks and YouTube Embed, however, are likely to continue to have big changed applied to them.

If after this I find some time, I have a number of plugins that I’d like to turn my hand to, including a banner rotation plugin. There are a number available in the market but none that offer what I need (and I’m not being particularly needy either) – it was actually a user who asked me about this after coming across the same problem.

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But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.

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For Users

Experienced users will appreciate the new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, the new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and the new Tumblr importer. We’ve also been thinking a ton about what the WordPress experience is like for people completely new to the software. Version 3.3 has significant improvements there with pointer tips for new features included in each update, a friendly welcome message for first-time users, and revamped help tabs throughout the interface. Finally we’ve improved the dashboard experience on the iPad and other tablets with better touch support.

For Developers

There is a ton of candy for developers as well. I’d recommend starting your exploration with the new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, more performant post-slug-only permalinks, and of course the entire list of improvements on the Codex and in Trac.

The official WordPress announcement

3.3 Codex Details

Change Details

Download 3.3 (entire installation)

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Thankfully, Memset provide cPanel and a host of data analysis tools. As you can see from this graph it’s rocketed since mid-October.

I’d love to say it’s because visitors have gone up as much, but that’s not the case. Looking at the biggest bandwidth hogging files, it’s exactly as normal – in fact nothing in particular is causing it.

What did happen mid-October though is that I started looking and changing the site’s caching. I’d been using PHP Speedy with all options switched on (except for GZIP, which I had in my .htaccess file along with a few other tweaks) but was finding that was breaking Debug Bar and jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries. You can exclude certain scripts from PHP Speedy but that didn’t seem to fix the problem.

I therefore decided to try an alternative method. After some testing I settled on WP Super Cache (to cache the pages – this improved speed but not bandwidth as the same size results are delivered) and WP Minify (this combines and minifies the scripts – something that PHP Speedy did, but I could get WP Minify to work with the aforementioned Debug Bar and Lightbox scripts). I also retained my .htaccess changes.

And that’s how it’s been since. The site’s very quick BUT it looks like the size of the pages being delivered are horrendous.

The cause? Right now, I have no idea and I’m still tinkering – expect to see some site problems over the next few days as I try and resolve it.

What I’ve immediately done is switch off WP Minify and put PHP Speedy back on. Oddly, it’s working with GZIP switched on – if the .htaccess changes are working, this shouldn’t work. I therefore need to check my .htaccess further. Maybe the changes made to this file by WP Super Cache have affected it.

Certainly something has to be done with some urgency and if I have to I’ll abort all changes and had back to PHP Speedy solely (and break those other scripts). My hunch – GZIP isn’t working. Testing tools indicate otherwise.

I’ll update this post, as it may be of use to other developers. And, of course, if you have any ideas please comment and let me know your thoughts.

Update, 16th November.

Sorted. Although online testing tools reported that GZIP was working, it wasn’t. Activating that has put my bandwidth back to normal…

Through some further testing I’ve settled on using WP Minify rather than PHP Speedy. I’m also using WP Super Cache but note that this doesn’t affect bandwidth, only speed.

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For each font that you wish to add simply add the following code to your CSS…

@font-face {
    font-family: 'DroidSansRegular';
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot');
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.svg#DroidSansRegular') format('svg');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

You’ll need to change the font-family to the name that you wish to give the font. Then there are 5 references to the font files – 4 different types to cover different browser requirements. Again, these will need changing appropriately.

This site previously used the font named Droid, which is the open source font used by Android. With last week’s introduction of Android 4, however, they’ve created a new font named Roboto – this has been designed for HD screens, so is perfect for websites.

If you wish to use either of these fonts, I’ve bundled them up ready for font-face (i.e. with each of the 4 formats that are required).

Download Droid

There are 3 versions of the font – standard, bold and mono space.

Download Roboto

There are 2 versions of the font – standard and bold.

Using JavaScript to capture contents is the easy bit – adding it to the clipboard is a lot more difficult. IE has a JavaScript command built in, other browsers vary. Unfortunately, other browsers (e.g. Firefox) also restrict this ability for security reasons. This is because the ability to write to the clipboard also comes with the ability to read from it as well – quite why this functionality can’t be detached and restrict just the reading I don’t know.

So, using JavaScript is problematic.

Thankfully I’m not the first to come across this problem and a third party script named ZeroClipboard is available. This uses Flash to update the clipboard, which doesn’t have the same security limitations. Of course if you’re viewing from a device that doesn’t support Flash (cough, splutter, iPad, iPhone, cough) then you’re still out of luck. None-the-less this seemed a perfect solution.

Unfortunately, my limited JavaScript skills failed me – I found the program to be over-complex for what I needed and failed to be able to get it to work.

At this point I found an alternative – ZClip uses ZeroClipboard but is controlled via JQuery (which is built into WordPress) and provide a much easier and friendly method of access.

I was now in a position where I had a working plugin. Until I used Admin Bar. That seemed to affect the positioning of the Flash overlay so you had to click slightly above the “Copy to clipboard” button to get it to work.

The customer, though, didn’t have an issue with this and I could only hope that they didn’t have anything else within their theme or plugins that could affect it in this way (I did try contacting the developer of Zclip but got no response).

What really ended it all though was the limited way of capturing text in zclip, which I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. ZClip can capture in 2 ways – from static fields (e.g. the text between a SPAN) or dynamic (e.g. from a field). The first doesn’t capture any formatting, even paragraph breaks – returning everything as one long line of text. The second did, but by capturing the HTML.

The customer wanted the customer to be able to copy to the clipboard long paragraphs of text – neither offered a neat solution to this.

Then I gave up. One day I may return to it – certainly ZeroClipboard will probably allow me to do what I need it to, but I’ll have to get my head around how to first.

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WordPress, and a result themes and plugins produced for it, are licensed under the GPL. What this means is that although you can product commercials versions, people are free to use and copy your results. Additionally, WordPress doesn’t integrate well with, for example, commercial plugins as there is no place for them on their site and, hence, no automatic updates.

Paid support is another option for plugin and theme authors but even they don’t seem to very popular, with one company who provides such support recently shutting down.

I’ve had a few requests to make changes to or write new plugins, but they usually don’t pan out particularly well – with so many plugins already available there’s usually a reason why one doesn’t exist

I get money from the advertising on this site but that barely covers the spiralling hosting costs. There are also various promotional methods further, but these are more to do with having a website rather than WordPress in particular.

So, getting rich is probably best left to the entrepreneur and those coming up with “the next big thing”.  But that’s fine with me – WordPress is GPL for a reason and it’s all about sharing. If I was in it for the money I’d have done something else instead!

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Apart from being extensively re-coded with various administration improvements (there’s an editor button for it, extra meta data in the Plugins menu, etc), there’s a lot of big improvements…

1. Cookies now store the state of each hidden/revealed section for each user – so if you collapse a section when you return to the page later it will still be like that! In addition, there are lots of options to override the default cookie settings.
2. Force all Content Reveal sections on the screen to do a single thing via the URL – e.g. make all content reveal in preparation for printing
3. The title which you click on to hide/show sections can be separated from the actual content, allowing you to place these elsewhere
4. Separate text can be specified for the title, allowing different things to appear depending on the state of the content

And much, much more!

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My host is Memset who, I have to say, are superb. But you pay for that quality and I was already having to pay more than I was last year due to bandwidth increases (you pesky visitors keep coming here!). There’s only so much money you can throw at something though before you have to have a bit more of a radical re-think. So, I made the decision to move my hosting  to UK2 and one of their rather professional looking business packages. Bandwidth would no longer be an issue but, as is often the case with cheaper providers, the occasional downtime may be.

I pointed my domain (which is held at 1&1) to the UK2 servers and although my holding page was now appearing I couldn’t get FTP access. I raised a support request but didn’t hear anything until last night – it had taken some time for the IP changes to be propagated to their FTP server. This morning it was working so I uploaded the site but I was still getting the holding site. Another support request and they noticed that my site was pointing to the wrong IP. Now corrected, my site was live! Unfortunately I was getting server configuration errors – this was using an exact snapshot of the site as held by Memset.

Meantime, Memset had contacted me and I was in a position where I could double my bandwidth by paying just £1 extra a month.

By this time the decision was now easy. I have swapped my nameservers back to Memset and have cancelled my UK2 hosting – thankfully they have a 30 day money back guarantee.

Unfortunately, it comes with  a sting in its tail – they haven’t refunded me all my money. They have retained an administration fee for the free domain they provided me…

When you purchase the Business web hosting a free domain comes with it, because you are keeping the domain and cancelling the web hosting we have deducted the registration fee.

I’ve pointed out that they didn’t actually provide me with a new domain, I’d simply pointed my existing one to their nameservers at no cost to them. Eventually, they relented and paid me my full amount.

But, right now, I’m just happy to have the site working. Welcome back Memset!

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There are a number of new features, some of them cleaning up changes made recently to work around some issues that users were having. For example, you can now turn on and off options to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. I’ve also taken the opportunity to improve the error reporting as well.

Away from that, new features include more specific options for thumbnails – you now have 5 thumbnail types to choose from – and, most importantly, support for the latest API changes.

Recently, you may have noticed that the default YouTube player has changed from a light grey to a much darker scheme. At the same time YouTube updated their player API to allow users to switch between light and dark themes. They also took the opportunity to add a feature where you can change the colour of the progress bar from red to white. Both of these are now supported by my plugin, so if you want the old light colour back you can do.

However, whilst testing this I can across what looked like a bug with YouTube’s API. I couldn’t get the light theme to work with the white progress bar – the progress bar would always appear in red. I double checked my own code to ensure it wasn’t my issue but I don’t believe it is.

YouTube’s own blog entry suggest that this entry is valid…

I opened this up in their forum where another user of the API confirmed my find. However, over 24 hours later, I have yet to receive a response from YouTube.

I’m therefore releasing the plugin as-is but with mention of this issue in the instructions.

Update (19/8/11 @ 19:36): Google have provided an update on the bug…

This is a bug, and it is scheduled to be fixed next Wednesday
evening.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

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